The Mafia Boss’s Innocent Prisoner Chapter 02
Bastian did not move for several seconds.
Then he lowered the knife.
“Explain.”
“Ask Theo.”
“I’m asking you.”
Blood reached the edge of my jaw. I could feel it dripping onto the coat.
“I was his girlfriend for four years. Three months ago,
Vivienne showed him pictures of me with another man.”
“She said I had been feeding information to a rival
family. Theo believed her.”
“What information did you have?”
“None. Theo kept me a secret. I never attended your
meetings. I never entered your offices. I didn’t even
know where this place was until your men dragged me here.”
Bastian looked at Malcolm.
“Find out. Everything.”
Malcolm left without a word.
Bastian pulled a chair in front of me and sat down.
“If you’re lying, I’ll know.”
“You thought you knew before you cut me.”
His jaw tightened.
It was the first sign that anything I said had reached him.
“Why did Theo send you to Velvet Saints?”
“He didn’t own me, so he destroyed every place I could go. The school expelled me for conduct that never happened. The hospital canceled my placement.”
“Every clinic that offered me work suddenly changed its mind.”
I looked at the blood on my chest.
“The club manager told me Theo had personally
approved my application.”
“And you still took the job.”
“Rent doesn’t care about pride.”
The door opened twenty minutes later.
Malcolm carried a tablet and a thin folder.
“Her story checks out,” he said. “She was in the top five percent of her nursing class. No criminal record. No foreign accounts. No contact with the Romano crew.”
Bastian’s face stayed hard.
“The money?”
“The receiving account was opened online with at
stolen copy of her driver’s license. The meeting photos
were edited. The whole source package is fake.”
“How bad?”
“Made to order. Someone wanted us to take her.”
Silence filled the room.
Bastian looked at my wrists. The rope had cut the skin open.
Then he looked at my face.
At what he had done before checking whether I was guilty.
“Untie her.”
Malcolm cut the rope.
My arms fell forward. Pain rushed through both shoulders. I tried to stand, but my knees gave out.
Bastian caught me.
I flinched so hard that my teeth clicked together.
His hands released me at once.
“Get the doctor,” he told Malcolm.
“I don’t need your doctor. I need to leave.”
“No.”
“You know I’m innocent.”
“I know you weren’t the rat named in that file.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“Not in my world.”
I laughed. I could not help it.
“Your world shot a man in front of me, kidnapped me, tied me to a chair, and cut my face. Forgive me if I don’t respect its rules.”
Bastian stood.
“You saw an execution. You saw the entrance to one of my compounds. Someone used you to get close to my family, and I don’t know why. Until I do, you stay.”
“So I’m still your prisoner.”
“Yes.”
At least he did not lie about it.
An older doctor stitched my cheek and wrapped both wrists. No one gave me a name. No one apologized.
Afterward, Malcolm took me upstairs.
The basement sat beneath the Kane estate in
Westchester, almost an hour north of Manhattan. The upper floors looked nothing like the room where Bastian had tortured me.
White stone. Dark wood. Tall windows facing bare winter trees.
We stopped at a guest room larger than my old apartment.
There were clean clothes on the bed. Food waited beside them.
The windows did not open.
The door locked from the outside.
Bastian stood in the hall.
“How long?” I asked.
“Until I find the person who sent that file.”
“And if you never do?”
He held my gaze.
“Capturing you was my first mistake.”
For one stupid second, I thought the next words might
be an apology.
“Releasing you now would be my second.”
The door closed between us.